28 Hours Later

So, having worked a bit more on the blog (notice the new, new layout; incredible thanks to Bryan Tighe, for having adapted the Hemingway theme to Movable Type, and to Byrne Reese, for hosting it), I have several other issues with Movable Type, as I handle the little bits of the transition:

• Standards Compliance. Yes, I know that standards are kind of a pain to deal with-- but there are good reasons for them (so that we can all blame IE for rendering problems, for one, but also so that any screenreader/weird experimental browser/etc. can all read the page the same way. The big ones (XHTML, CSS) have been around forever. So why is it that Movable Type, as shipped, doesn't validate as *either* clean CSS or XHTML? The CSS one is just a warning-- but it's simple to fix, enough so that it makes it seem like it's been ignored. As for XHTML-- again, it's not hard. They specify XHTML 1.0 Transitional (not the highest possible bar), but they don't even get there! None of this may be their highest priority, but it makes me somewhat cranky when I have to go poke through template code to fix something that is broken by default. (You'll note that my pages are now fully compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1; check the bottom of the page.) Please note, however, that I had at *least* as much to fix with Wordpress when I started with it, so this isn't MT-specific; if, however, MT were to make it perfect (at least with the set of default templates/styles) it would be a nice thing.
  
• There's no built-in support for a blogroll. It's not the biggest thing in the world, but especially because of XFN, it would be really nice if MT had some easy, chromed way to add blog links with XFN relationships to a widget somewhere. It's certainly not impossible to do myself, but it seems like an often-wished-for feature they're missing. I know people want it, because of the number of users of the MT Blogroll plugin-- unfortunately, that hasn't been updated for MT 4.x, so it's not useful to me. Wordpress *does* have this.
  

On the other hand, I've found more things to like about Movable Type, as well:

• It's dead-easy to write my own widgets, something I personally struggled with in Wordpress. It took only a few minutes to make a blogroll that fit in a widget (not dynamic or database driven, but it works and looks fine); you can see it in action down at the bottom.
• Awesome defaults-- for instance, look at the Archive Page. Isn't that nice? Wordpress never gave me anything as clean and functional as that for my archives, though I could have used it. (And obviously, it becomes more important the more you blog.)
• Once again, incredible speed compared to Wordpress. Your mileage may vary, but compared to a version of Wordpress my shared host had specifically worked on to make it faster-- MT just kicks its butt.

So I'm still happy. Adding a few things would make me even happier, but I suppose you don't always get what you want right away. For now-- back to work, this time on the sort of things for which I'm graded. :-)


[EDIT: For spelling, as pointed out subtly by Byrne in the comments. :-) ]